HACKER Q&A
📣 bunnybomb2

Why is everyone in tech so performative/two faced


I am not technical I just like building and making friends and having fun inventing

It feels 70% of people I meet, are trying to determine what you can get them, if u r important enough or trying to butter you up in a coffee chat

What happened to building cool stuff, not having a ego and being real. Sorry if this isnt allowed. I dont know where else to post. Am i hanging out in the wrong crowds?

  👤 more_corn Accepted Answer ✓
Try hanging out with people who have paying jobs doing the thing. (Not trying to break in, not founding a startup, not selling an idea). I worked at a FAANG company. People were honestly smart, capable, humble. (There was a strong correlation between the most effective tech people and their humility)

Maybe I got lucky. In retrospect I probably got super lucky.

👤 nacozarina
pick your clique: nerds & hustlers

the two tribes of tech

👤 andsoitis
what kinds of things have you built?
👤 pestatije
because theres so much money in it...try the arts, social services, religion, primary and secondary sectors, and people are way nicer
👤 polarberry33
Lol.
👤 JSR_FDED
It’s because Tech is too broad a word, encompassing curious engineers with pure motives all the way to hucksters shilling their offerings for ad revenue.
👤 ensocode
do you have any hacker spaces nearby. You should meet the good people there
👤 austin-cheney
> What happened to building cool stuff, not having an ego and being real.

There are certainly developers building stuff just for the passion of solving problems and producing high quality products. You have to know where to find these people, because they aren’t common and typically are not self promoting.

The people more interested in marketing and promoting themselves tend to devote more time and attention to that noise than the energy required to solving challenging problems.

👤 sloaken
Ok I will give you a simple method to separate the 2 groups of nerds and hustlers. Now this is not fool proof, but is good for about 80% of the time.

If they approach you - Hustler.

If you HAVE to start the conversation - Nerd - you might have to restart it too.

Most nerds are so involved in tech that they do not spend time working on social skills.

Most hustlers skip the tech and refine their social skills.

So find some techie forums / meetup / events and start interacting.

Myself I can fake social for about 15 to 30 minutes, but then I am exhausted. And I could not hustle my way out of a paper bag.